Introduction

The main purpose of this investigation is - of course - to contribute
to the stylistic description of H. C. Andersen's texts, but since style
and stylistics are quite broad terms, I find it necessary to clarify the use
of the concepts in this context.

In general the theoretical notion of style covers features of
artefacts (or human acts) which display the "way" things are done or the
"mode" of doing them in case there actually are different ways or modes.
The denotation of the term "style" may include a huge amount of not
always intuitively related phenomena, and in this context I shall
confine myself to what is normally conceived of as either literary or
linguistic style.

Linguistic Style

I have previously argued that

... linguistic style is the form of a specific linguistic sign,
expressing specific information about a specific universe of discourse
or context (a referential universe), if there are in fact alternative
form which may be interpreted as referring to basically the 'same'
referential universe. (Götzsche 1994a p. 159)

I still hold this view to some extent, but I shall redefine and qualify
the point of view below.

But first I have to clarify the distinction between my approach to
the investigation of linguistic style and other stylistic approaches. The
first kind of approach can be labelled "literary style", because its
primary aim is to characterise the metaphorical and poetical features of
literary works. As is well known, the central part of the standard account
of Danish stylistics, Albeck (1939), is concerned with these matters,
i.e. the tropes (metaphors and metonyms and derivations thereof), and
the stylistic figures (i.e. the musical features of rhythm and rhyme on
the one hand, and the patterns of different kinds of word order on the
other). Albeck also deals with the choice of words and syntactic
constructions, but there can be no doubt that the purpose of characterising these
features is to contribute to the description of the literary work. It is
evident that what is investigated is linguistic form and content, but it is
equally evident that the form is investigated only as a medium of the
content, and that the result of the analysis is a description of the conceptual
and emotional functions of the form in the fictional universe of the
literary work.

The other kind of approach can be labelled the "semiotic
approach", because it takes up any kind of (linguistic) communication as its
material of analysis and investigates all the "communicative (linguistic)
levels" of (linguistic or other) media, often written texts. This
approach implies the assumption that there are a number of "deeper levels"
under the surface of the communicative (linguistic) form, and that these
patterns of meaning have certain functions in the (linguistic)
communication, the most important function being the "effects" on the
person(s) who receive the (linguistic) message. In the case of texts it is
evident that such an approach involves the investigation of both the
"semantics", the "pragmatics" and the "situation context" of the text, and
furthermore it involves interpretations of general phenomena
concerning the psychological and social characteristics of people. A proponent
of this view is Cassirer (cf. Cassirer 1970 and 1986), and in a recent
paper (Cassirer 1994b) he elaborates his line of
reasoning.1 His point of view implies that the most important feature of style is the effect of the
linguistic product on persons, and consequently he proposes that
stylistics as a notion within philological and linguistic research should be
replaced by the notion of rhetoric (cf. Cassirer 1994a p. 14). This
constitutes a coherent theory of (some of) the functions of the linguistic
sign, and therefore it will be a logical step to classify it as a "semiotic approach". But it follows from the central concepts of the theory that
certain linguistic forms are supposed to have been chosen by the
author (primarily?) because of their assumed or predicted effects, and
that there may have been alternative linguistic forms, the use of which
have been rejected because they might have had other effects. This
furthermore implies that the most important reasons for choosing specific
linguistic forms seem to be the assumed or predicted effects on the
communicating persons, and not what they actually are talking or
writing about. Therefore this approach may yield the most convincing
analyses when the materials of the investigation are commercial or political
language, or literary works.

I do not reject the approaches mentioned above, but I shall point
to the fact that there seem to be some features of linguistic signs -
including literary works - which in general are not captured by these
approaches. Such features - which may be almost impossible to
translate (cf. Götzsche 1994b) - have to do with the overall impression of
the mode of expressing oneself which constitutes the style of an author
or the style of a genre, and they may be captured by a focused
investigation of the linguistic form of a linguistic product. Within the scope of
literary fiction such investigations are only justified insofar as they contribute
to the descriptions of literary works, but they may also be applied to
other linguistic products as a part of the research in the functions of oral
and written communication in societies.

If an investigation like this is to be made applicable, a number of
theoretical, conceptual classifications have to be made. First of all the
theoretical concept of style is by no means clear, and I shall propose a
definition saying that: style is the form of a linguistic
sign. This definition has the advantage (i.e. it makes the notion precise and clearly
specified) that it is connected with an overall theory of semiotics, but that it
deals only with linguistic expressions. Other kinds of style may be
labelled with other terms. Furthermore it has the advantage that it does not
deal with the "deeper levels" of a linguistic product, such as its specific
"semantics" and "pragmatics", but is delimited to linguistic form (cf.
below). Accordingly, one is not tempted to make empathic
interpretations of the forms to explain the choice of expressions; one only has to
describe the characteristics of the linguistic product - expressed in a
particular language - to say something about its style. Finally the
definition has the advantage that it is not especially controversial what the
subject of investigation is, namely the linguistic expressions and not the special
"contextual" meanings expressed by them, or the pattern of the
universe of discourse. To be able to apply a terminology in such descriptions it
is necessary to make some theoretical distinctions.

Text and Work

First of all one has to separate the literary work from the text. Since
H. C. Andersen's fairy tales and other stories are the materials of this
investigation, these literary "texts" each have both a form and a content,
and the content includes both the meaning of words and sentences, and
the narrative or poetic (fictional) universe of the "texts". But the
fictional universe based on the special meanings of words and sentences
employed by each single "text" - and the semantics of words and
sentences - is relevant to the stylistic investigation only to the extent that
their general meanings are drawn upon in the characterisation of the
linguistic form. Accordingly the special meanings of words and sentences,
and their establishing a certain fictional universe, constitute the elements
of the literary work, and "The text is just a sequence of words, and the
only kind of interpreting that one can do of a text is to expound the
meanings of its constituent words and sentences as they are given by the
conventions of the language" (Currie 1991 p. 338), i.e. a text can be
investigated by grammatical (including sentence and word semantic)
methods only. Consequently the stylistic investigation carried out in the
following only considers the texts of H. C. Andersen as its subject, not
the literary works expressed by those texts.

Then what are grammatical methods, if only such methods can
be applied to texts, and to what extent is it plausible to draw upon the
(general) semantics and pragmatics of the words and sentences without
being theoretically inconsistent? If one follows the line of reasoning
behind the definition of the theoretical concept of style proposed
above, then there emerges a difference between on the one hand the form of
the linguistic sign as a whole, and on the other hand the form of the
minimal linguistic sign. In other theoretical contexts (cf. Götzsche 1994a p.
54 sqq) I have argued that the definition of a sentence should be just
that, namely the form of the minimal linguistic sign. For a sequence of
linguistic expressions to be interpreted as a sentence, it must be
constructed in accordance with a certain linguistic structure, namely the
syntactic structure of the particular language in which the sentence in
constructed; and this is the scope of syntax. Style, then, is the form of the whole of a linguistic sign, while syntax is the specific structure of the parts
of the linguistic sign that makes these parts sentences. Both syntax
and style can be conceived of within the scope of grammar in a broad
sense. If one asks what the entities subjected to scrutiny in each case
actually are, then the normal answer is that they are words in sentences
and words investigated as cross-sentence entities. Theoretically, this is
not without problems (cf. Götzsche 1994a p. 175 sqq), but as for this
project it will do, and accordingly the two subjects of this paper are some
salient stylistic features: 1) the nature of the syntactic constructions, and 2)
the lexical characteristics of the texts of H. C. Andersen called fairy
tales and stories ("Eventyr og Historier").

In connection with these considerations concerning the
theoretical notion of style it is crucial to observe that the notion proposed
above does not presuppose a notion of stylistic variation, and in this respect
it differs substantially from traditional stylistics. In accordance with
the point of view held by me now - a view that differs from my
previous accounts (cf. the quotation above) - variation and variability are a
possible property of style, not a prerequisite, and this should solve the
problem of how to describe the style of expressions for which there are
no alternative forms, e.g. numerals in arithmetic.

The Methods of Investigation

The overall purpose of the following investigation is to ascertain
the general features of the syntactic constructions in some of H. C.
Andersen's texts, and furthermore the general lexical features of the
same. Accordingly, the textual properties examined are the ones mentioned
in the title of this paper: complexity and regularity. This includes both
the syntax and the lexicon of the texts. Thus syntactic constructions can
be said to be either complex or simple, and either type may occur more
or less often in the texts, and in parallel the words of a text may
display different occurrences. This implies that the features are no parameters
in a strict sense, because the corresponding values have no either/or
(but not both) instantiations. Complexity and simplicity are relative
notions, and one has to decide about more or less arbitrary limits between
them. But once these limits have been established they can function as
parameters, and the frequency of the values can be estimated. Frequency
is also a relative concept in this investigation, because the observed
frequencies of the units of the different texts are fairly easy to find, but
what is interesting is the relative frequency of these units in each text,
or as cross-text relative frequency (for convenience relative frequency
will be expressed as percentage in the following). And to make the results
of the statistics relevant to a stylistic description one has to decide about
a more or less arbitrary borderline between frequent and non-frequent
occurrences.

It should be noticed that the occurrence of words is no straight
forward concept. In this context I shall only look upon words as
word forms (i.e. specific combinations of letters - so-called word types of
a lexicon - found as word tokens between blanks in texts) and as
lexemes (abstract words of which the word forms are inflections). The term
word will be used in no other sense than word form, and accordingly
lexical occurrence is the (observed or relative) frequency of the word
tokens (henceforth: text words) of word forms and lexemes.

To carry out a limited part of the task mentioned above two kinds
of preliminary investigation have been made: a lexical statistical survey
of the first 31 of the texts of the corpus "Eventyr og Historier", and a
syntactic analysis of the sentence(s) of randomly chosen periods in the
first 31 texts of the corpus. It would be difficult to carry out manual
parsing of all the 31 texts, so I have selected the period (defined as the
text between full stops) after the 23rd full stop and carried out a
syntactic analysis of the sentence(s) incorporated in the period. If the text is
too short - i.e. there are not 23 full stops (or there are less than 5 full
stops between the 23rd and the end of the text) - I have selected the
period after the 5th full stop. Should there be any peculiarities about the
period after the 23rd full stop (e.g. it is not a full sentence but a sentence
fragment) I have chosen the 47th period as the pivot.

The Style of H. C. Andersen's Texts

In the introduction above I have mentioned the syntactic analysis
first, but in fact I shall start with the statistics of the lexical units. In the
traditional account of H. C. Andersen's (HCA's) style and language by
Jensen (1929) it is claimed that HCA is especially fond of the
adjectives nydelig and dejlig:

...nydelig er et antageligt ord, men bedre er - hvilket? [...]
Hvorhen vi end vender os i eventyrenes verden, møder vi dette
adjektiv [i.e. dejlig].
... pretty is an acceptable word, but what is better is - which
one? [...] Wherever we look in the world of the fairy tales we meet
this adjective. (Jensen 1929 p. 11)

This is not a precise evaluation of the occurrence of the words, and
by means of modern technology it is possible to test the claim. The
questions can be posed like this: is it true that the words mentioned are
especially frequent in HCA's texts; are there any words which - apart
from these - are especially frequent; and are these words also frequent
in Modern Standard Danish?

To try to answer the questions I have counted the words of each of
the first 11 texts in the electronic version of "Eventyr og Historier" and
also the words of a combined corpus of the first 31 texts. The texts are
named by the "Eventyrkode" (Fairy Tale code) number according to
Møller (1967 pp. 9-11), and they will be referred to by these figures. All
the words of the texts and the corpus have been counted by means of
some simple computational routines, and out of these sequences of text
words has been automatically produced a list of lexicon words (word types)
in which each word is followed by a figure stating the number of
occurrences (text words or word tokens). A typical example of such a list
is displayed in appendix 1 which is an extract of the list made on the
basis of text 010, selecting a part of the list with the initial letter
h - which is a letter with a medium frequency as an initial letter (ca. 4500 words
of the corpus). Examining appendix 1, what is striking at a first glance
is the fact that relatively few of the words occur more than one or
two times, although the text is the longest of the 11 texts (9 509 text words).

After that I have, from each text, selected the lexemes with a total
of word forms of 10 or more for further investigation, and these
words form a special list. By experience it can be assumed that the length
of the texts does not significantly affect the probability of occurring 10
or more times, because the longer the text the larger the lexicon (cf.
appendix 1) and the possibility of variation, and the shorter the text the
higher the relative frequency of frequent words, so presumably not
many words will be eliminated because of the limit at 10 words. In addition
I have, in the special list, included the lexemes
deilig and nydelig because they are of special interest, although they do not have 10 or more
word form occurrences. In the special list I have marked the words
which either belong to the core set of words in Modern Standard Danish
or which are thematic words, i.e. words belonging naturally to the
theme of the story. The core words are the ones isolated by means of advanced
statistical methods by Ruus (1995), and they are marked with a K in
the list. Words which are thematic are marked with a T in the list, and
words not belonging to the core set of Modern Standard Danish (MSDan)
but belong to the set of the 5 000 most frequent MSDan words (cf.
DFO) are marked with an F.

The interesting feature of the list is that there is only one word in
the residual list: nydelig. Most of the words have been sorted out
because they are K-words, and words like Hex, Hund, Penge, Prinsesse,
Soldat, Øine are considered thematic words because they are connected
with the theme (including the persons) of the text. The only word which
is not a K-word but an F-word is
Øine, but as mentioned it is also
thematic. The residual word nydelig is one of the words mentioned by
Jensen above, but (as mentioned above) it does not appear in the list by
nature, because it does not occur 10 or more times; in fact it occurs only
two times in 001. The lexeme does in fact occur in various word forms
in most of the other 10 texts (in total 47 times), but most of the
occurrences are concentrated in a limited number of texts: 004 (13), 005 (18)
and 006 (11); and none of the isolated word form occurrences (text
words) per text amounts to 10 or more times; only the word form totals do
so. One of the word forms (nydelig) also occurs with a relatively high
frequency in the whole (31-text) corpus of 94 206 text words (e.g.
nydelig: 0.032 (observed frequency: 30)), as compared with the very
low MSDan frequency: 0.00075 (observed frequency: 30), but one
might ask whether this difference is especially relevant. An observed
frequency of 30 nydelig text words in a corpus of 94 206 words is, of
course, relatively higher than an observed frequency of 30
nydelig text words in a corpus of 4 000 000 text words, but it is questionable whether one
can justifiably claim that in the first case the word
nydelig is especially frequent, when one only meets this text word 30 times when reading
94 206 words. If nydelig is included in a set (a semantic paradigm)
with other word forms of the same lexeme, the number of occurrences
increases to 83, and although this figure is almost three times as high,
it does not undermine the argument: 83 occurrences in a corpus
containing 94 206 text words still does not deserve a predicate like
"Wherever we look we meet".

The same kind of reasoning may be applied to the lexeme
deilig and its inflectional word forms. It is, in fact, one of the core words
of MSDan, but only in two cases in the 11-text corpus does a word
form occur in a single text as a text word more than 9 times
(D/deilige 16 times in 007 and 21 times in 008). As opposed to the lexeme
nydelig, the relative frequency of
deilig/e is actually significant (technically in
a non-statistical way). In fact, the word form
deilig occurs 26 times as often in text 001 as in MSDan, and
deilige occurs 51 times as often as in MSDan in text 004, but these ratios are based on a rather small
number of occurrences: 4 in text 001 (2 531 text words) and 7 in text 004 (2
729 text words). So, even though the relative frequencies of related
word forms (inflections and derivations) of
deilig in the texts are fairly high compared with MSDan, the difference in observed frequencies
between MSDan and the 31-text corpus (315 occurrences in the corpus of 94
206 text words; relative frequency: 0.334) does not justify the claim
that "Wherever we look we meet" in HCA. To put it tersely: one
might question whether 630 occurrences (or 945 or 1 260) would affect
the overall impression of a word being used very often if the
occurrences were equally distributed in the text corpus of 94 206 text words. On
the other hand the general impression of HCA's tendency to use these
particular words in certain texts may seem justified (on the background
of the limited data which has been examined), but with the proviso that
the occurrences are concentrated in specific texts and display fairly low
frequencies in other texts.

In connection with salient and semantically significant words
like deilig and nydelig one may ask whether there are other less
salient words the frequency of which by itself makes them interesting as
an example of the lexical favourites of HCA. In text 002 one finds
the word ganske which has a relative frequency in the text of 0.228,
which means that it occurs 9.0 times as often as in MSDan, and in text 004
the ratio is 20 : 1 in favour of HCA. The overall occurrence in the corpus
is 7.7 times as high as in MSDan, so one might assume that HCA -
one way or the other - "prefers" this "insignificant" word. The statistics
evidently has to be related to the semantics of a word. For instance
the word dandse occurs 12 times in text 004 (a relative frequency of
0.440), and this means that the frequency is 146 times as high as in MSDan,
but this obviously has to do with the theme of the story. The word
dandse cannot be substituted by another word when the author wants to
tell about somebody who dances, while the word
ganske - both as an adjective an (especially) as an adverb - can be substituted by a number
of other words.

This pattern is repeated throughout the statistics of the 11 texts:
words with very high HCA-frequencies (e.g.
raabte, 120 times as frequent as in MSDan, text 002) are semantically specific words, and words with
medium high frequencies are either possible HCA-preferences like
ganske or stor (3 times the MSDan frequency, text 001) or context bound
and semantically more or less "empty" words like the deictic
hun (in the 31, text corpus 2.3 times the MSDan frequency).

By means of this combination of semantic identification and
statistical evaluation it appears (on the basis of the limited set of data)
that there are very few, if any, favourite words of HCA. And if there
are actually some words, then they are concentrated in the context. In
connection with the syntactic analysis below I shall call this
concentration stylistic contextual
regularity.2 While frequency says something
about global textual occurrence (or corpus occurrence) of words but
nothing about how they are concentrated, regularity can be said to be an effect
of the local distribution of words in certain contextual parts of a text.
How a reader experiences the importance of a word - what kind of
psychological impression it makes on him - seems to be more a matter of
contextual regularity (combined with the thematic meaning of the
word) than it is a matter of its observed or relative frequency. Consequently
the claim made by Jensen (1929) concerning the whole of HCA's
work seem to be a result of a psychological mechanism rather than
empirical facts, and the problem of "Wherever we look we meet" seems
to belong to the realm of literary works and not to the stylistic
examination of texts.

It is a salient feature of HCA's texts and syntax that the periods
(text between full stops) of his texts are often short, and that - if the
periods are long - the sentences are short. I have not investigated the statistics
of short vs. long periods. Such an investigation would require
theoretical reasoning about the operational concepts of shortness vs. length,
and furthermore software which is capable of testing the data. The
software is fairly easy to develop, but there is no reason to do so before
meaningful notions of the theoretical concepts have been established.

Instead I have made a random selection of periods in the first 31
texts, estimated the length as short or long, and analysed the syntactic
constructions of some of the sentences. The random selection has not
been made by a random generator but according to the method
mentioned above. Of the selection of 31 periods it appears that about half of
them (14) are rather short periods (cf. appendix 3). As for the rest of the
periods some of them have a "normal" length:

The function of the length of periods is mostly a matter of the
reading process, but in general there is a relation between the periods and
the sentences of the periods, i.e. one normally does not expect a long
sequence of sentences (i.e. equivalent syntactic constructions on the
same level in a syntactic hierarchy) with no full stops separating the
sentences. Rather one would (in MSDan) expect a number of
subordinate clauses (and subordinate clauses in subordinate clauses) as the
reason for the distance between the full stops. But this does not apply to
many of HCA's periods, exemplified in example 019 above. So, on the
one hand one may characterise example 019 as a complex sequence of
text words in a period - which may be difficult to read, and on the other
hand the syntactic structure of the sentences of the period is rather
simple:3

019 [.23]

De s

seilede v

saa længe, pa------->

at sc

der fs

ingen Land var ns --------v

at sp

øine mere, og-------ra ß c

de s

saae v

en Flok Storke, o-------------ß

de s

kom v

ogsaa qa

hjemme fra ogpa---------ßc

vilde s v

til depa

varme Lande; -------------ß

den ene Stork s-----------

fløi v

bag ra

ved den anden ogpa ------------ßc

de s

havde v

allerede pa

fløiet iv

saa langt, pa-------

saa langt; pa------ß

een af dem var s-----------v

saa træt,sp-------

at >sc

hans Vinger s----------

næsten pa

ikke na

kunde v

bære iv

ham o

længer, pa

han s

var v

densp-

allersidste i Rækken og-------------------ßc

snart pa

kom v

han s

et stort Stykke bagpa-----------------

efter, -----ß

tilsidst pa

sank v

han s

med udbredte Vinger pa -----------------

lavere pa

og c

lavere, pa ß

han s

gjorde v

endnu et Par Slag med Vingerne, o------------------------------ß

men c

det s

hjalp v

ikke;na ß

nu pa

berørte v

han s

med sine Fødder pa--------------

Tougværket paa Skibet, o----------------------ß

nu pa

gled v

han s

ned ra

af pa

Seilet ß

og c

bums! ∑__ß

der pa

stod v

han s

paa Dækket.pa ---------

There are a limited number of syntactic constituents in each
sentence (including the subordinate clauses), most of the constituents
are rather short, and the phrase structure of each constituent is
quite simple. So, apart from the extreme length of the period the most
significant feature of HCA's syntax - based on this example and
the short periods in appendix 3 - is that it is fairly simple or
primitive. Before passing over to some more complicated examples I
shall mention a salient feature in example 019 which is related to the
account of word frequency and regularity above: the word
og as a conjunction between sentences occurs 4 times, and it is even
more frequent in the local context of:

Here we find also the word
deiligt, and this concentration of alleged HCA-features is an example of what I would label with the above
mentioned notion of stylistic contextual regularity.

Actually HCA is able to employ a fairly complicated syntax:

031 [.05]

Springgaasen s

sagde v

ikke noget, no-------&szlig

men c

man s

sagde v

om va

den, do

at den o>sc s

tænkte v

desto mere pa------

og c

da Hofhunden pa>sc s

bare pa

snøftede v

til den,va o <

indestod v

han s

for va

at Springgaasen o>sc s

var v

af god Familie; sp------------ß

den gamle s---------

Raadmand, der ---------->cs

havde v

faaet iv

tre Ordener for at tie stille,o-----------pa-------------<

forsikkredev

at o>sc

han s

vidste v

at Springgaasen o>sc s

var v

begavet med va----------

Spaadoms-Kraft, o <

man s

kunde v

see iv

paa Ryggen af den om pa---------------- o>sc

man s

fik v

en mild o------

eller c

en stræng o--------

Vinter --- <

og c

det o

kan v

man s

ikke engang see na----------iv

paa Ryggen af ham der pa---------------->cs

skriver v

Almanaken.o

Sentence no. 2 follows a primitive and short initial sentence, and it
contains a subordinate clause as an object (o> <ß). This is followed by
a 3rd sentence beginning with an adverbial subordinate clause (pa>
<) and ending with another subordinate clause as an object (o> <ß).
In the 4th sentence the subject is furnished with an attributive
subordinate clause (>cs <), and immediately after the verb another
subordinate clause follows functioning as an object, and this subordinate
clause contains in itself a subordinate clause, also as an object (o> o>
<<ß). The last sentence of the period displays similar complexities.
This is not heavy syntax, but I have in other texts (e.g. "Historien om
en Moder") found even more complex syntactic constructions, so
HCA does not avoid syntactic complexity if it serves his purposes.
Example 019 can be said to be an instance of syntactic (stylistic) contextual
regularity; as opposed to what may be called lexical (stylistic)
contextual regularity (cf. example 005 above). Of course syntactic contextual
regularity is also a matter of frequent occurrence, but it should be noticed
that what is being repeated is not identical units, as with words. What is
being repeated in a certain context is the phenomenon of syntactic
simplicity; not identical syntactic structures.

As an overall impression of the style of HCA the most salient
feature seems to be the fact that in longer texts he does not repeat himself
very often (cf. appendix 1). It is true - to some extent - that he has
certain iterated ways of expressing himself: a few special words, short
periods and sentences; but looking through the lists of observed frequency
of lexicon words, the most striking feature is his capacity of variability.
In my view the special (peculiar) features of his style are not very
special. Maybe the results of traditional descriptions of his style have not
all been based on empirical excerptions. Instead the phenomenon of what
I call stylistic contextual regularity may yield a subjective impression of
frequency, and this impression may be psychologically confirmed
by the scattered distribution of the features in other contexts without
stylistic regularity. Accordingly - in my view - the most important feature
of HCA's style is the variation of the linguistic expressions.

Conclusions

This is - as mentioned in the title - a preliminary approach. One
purpose of this paper is to contribute to the clarification of the theoretical
notion of linguistic style, another purpose is to contribute to the description
of HCA's style and language use. I have not made any suggestions
about the relation between my description and the well known literary
qualities of HCA's work, but I suppose that such linguistic investigations
are relevant, both to the literary interpretations of HCA, to the
characterisation of 19th century Danish in historical linguistics, and to
modernisation and translations of his texts.

If the methods employed and the results achieved are to be
improved, it involves some of the measures mentioned above, and furthermore
it would be an advance if some kind of automatic interpretation of
the syntactic constructions of texts - also parsing of the resulting
sentences - could be made possible. Then the whole HCA-corpus containing
174 texts would be more easily handled.

Notes

1. Somehow I have a feeling that his arguments are - in part - addressed to some
of my previously published reflections on the theoretical notion of style, but
they are not being referred to. tilbage

2. In the original version of this paper I used the technical term
stylistic contextual density about this phenomenon. Later I found out that "stylistic density" had
been used by Göran Kjellmer (cf. Kjellmer 1993 p. 29) about exactly the
opposite phenomenon, and I substituted the term density by regularity. tilbage

3. The letter symbols represent the normal constituents of sentences: s: subject,
v: verb, a: adverb, etc. (cf. Götzsche 1994a), and their specific meaning is not
essential in understanding the syntactic complexity. As for the more peculiar
symbols, the notation means: